Fire Studios

In this episode we welcome in our new season with an extend time-slot and even more changes you'll notice through the episode and discuss the very important topic of "The Jump To Freelancing", leaving your 9-to-5 to become your own boss and live your dream. Areas we cover are: "Going into Freelancing straight out of High School", "The Pro's and Con's of Freelancing", "How to Build a Client Base", and "Tools and Reasources for Freelancers".

In today's generation, an internet user can select from any range of browsers to use for their daily trudge through the net: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, but this freedom of choice has turned into an uphill battle for web developers when it comes to CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. We're constantly faced with the challenge of making our codes and designs look and function the same in every major browser a client’s site receives.

WordPress was developed to be extremely user friendly on both the front-end and the back-end, but also allow for some complex functions and features to be implemented for the more advanced and code knowledge of us. FS-2009 (the name of the theme released to FS at the start of the 2009 year) takes advantage of the many functions that WP has to offer, so I've created a screencast that covers all the PHP involved with creating this theme.

Just like Writers and Writer’s Block, Designers can get much the same. I find myself lost for ideas sometimes, and I am sure that many of the other designers out there that find this happening too!There are some simple and effective ways to bring these ideas to your head. These are just some of the things I like to do when I’m stuck, but I am sure that I’d share my techniques with some other fellow designers.

Anybody who is old enough to remember sites from before WordPress and CMS'es knows that the number one hardship of owning and running a site was updating it. You had to go through and update every file, move content from one document to another, it all took too long and was too much trouble.

Now we all use blogging engines and CMS'es because they remove this hardship. But what do you do if you have a site and implementing one of the many engines available would be too much hassle or over-kill? You create a simple system that updates the frequent areas that you change.

This is a guide we'll be using our podcast site FS-Air. Using only PHP and jQuery we'll create everything you see on the site. This tutorial assumes you have a understanding of HTML, CSS, jQuery, and PHP.

With the release of "Episode 7: Social Networks", FS-Air has finally reached the end of season 1. It was was an awesome ride, and we're no wear near done!

Starting next week FS-Air will feature a whole new format! We'll be taking it from a weekly, 30-minute long episode to a bi-weekly (maybe still be weekly) hour/hour-and-a-half roundtable discussion!

With Season 2 the FI-Team is looking to add 2 more regular panelist members! If you like to talk about what goes on in the Web, web development, or design then contact Fire G on skype by adding "fire-studios" to your contacts (or through any of the other clients listed here)!

Help children around the world by blogging! Tutorial9's "Gift of Knowledge Giveaway"is still accepting submissions until the first of February, so hurry up and start blogging and save a child in the process!

Time to recap our first 5 episodes of our podcast FS-Air!

It's been a month and a half since we first released our recordings to the net, and you all have been very responsive. So for all of you who haven't been following on the site or haven't subscribed to our iTunes feed, here's a small run down of everything that happened.

It's the new year, and with the new year come new content! We here at FS are going to try and keep up a 1 article a week schedule (compared to our 3 articles a month system we use currently) so as to constantly keep you guys up and in the know. You'll be seeing new series start, more technical oriented tutorials, as well as design and inspiration posts.

Now I know what you're thinking "Yeah, that's all well and good, but we need proof! Where's some cold hard evidence?" Well, since I can't just upload my localhost and let you guys examine that, you'll just have to take my word for it until you start seeing the results in a few days. But, tell you what, I'll give a little bit of meat to chew on while we get everything ready.

Here's a list of all the posts I plan to do, along with some series ideas:

It's officially 2009 folks! And with the new year ushers in a new dawn in FS history!

As you can see we updated the design! It's quite a massive overhaul compared to the last one, but it's better in every way I guarantee it. Go ahead, browse around, you'll find FS now looks leaps and bounds smoother and cleaner (not to mention more user-friendly no?).

There's a reason behind the updated design though, we've gone network! FS is now owned and operated under the label of Fire Interactive (site not active yet)! FI (as I'll be referring to it as) is the parent site for the whole family of sites that FS belongs to such as: FS-Air (our official podcast), Fire-G.com (not-active yet), Burning Stone Cold (Andrew's site), James' Blogs (James' site), and a few more topic centralized websites further down the road.

Everyone here at FI hopes you like the new design (especially Fire G since he designed and coded it) and we love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Have an amazing 2009!